How to Manage Hosting Account Quotas and Overages?
As a website owner, it's important that you become familiar with these steps to prevent overage. Earth Girl Hosting offers FlexUse billing so your account will never go down due to overage!
Get the Details
Log in to your Client Area to see what resources are over limit. Once logged in:
- Click Services
- Click the green Active button to the far right of the hosting package for your hosting account.
- Click the Resource Usage tab
Disk Space
Move any unneeded files on your hosting account. If you need assistance, contact our Tech Support. If there are no files that can be safely removed, consider upgrading to a package with unmetered disk space:
- Click Services
- Click the green Active button to the far right of the hosting package for your hosting account.
- Click the green Upgrade button below your package name
- Select the Earth Plan and continue checkout.
Which Files are Taking Up Space?
It's not always possible to tell you which files are taking up the most space, but you can get a general idea in your cPanel.
- From your Client Area, click the Hosting Information tab, then the cPanel One-Click Login link
- Click the Disk Usage icon
- This should give you a breakdown of where most of your files are. If you see that the mail/ folder bar is taking up a large portion of your hosting account, go in and delete some email from your webmail. Be sure to remove email from your trash folders as well.
- If your public_html/ folder is where the bulk of your files are, that's normal. Remove any old backups you may have sitting there, or contact support for assistance.
Bandwidth
What to Look for & Consider
- Are you uploading/downloading a lot of content to or from your site? Are you using high-resolution images for your products?
- Are you using a paid traffic service? This will eat up bandwidth with little, to no, results in sales (and they're against our Terms of Service). Cancel those services ASAP.
- Is your site traffic legitimate? (Are you getting thousands of hits from Ukraine but you don't market there?).
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- Click Services
- Click the green Active button to the far-right of the hosting package for your hosting account
- Scroll down and click Metrics
- Click the AWStats icon
- Adjust the date settings on the top of the screen to be sure you get a good sampling of data.
- On the left, click Locales (under the Who heading) - From here you'll see if you have too many hits from another country.
- On the left, click Hosts > Full List
- This will show you columns where you can easily see who us using up the most bandwidth. Copy any IP address from the left column, then go to http://www.ip-tracker.org/ and find out where that IP address originates.
- Block the IP address(es) in cPanel > IP Blocker
If you've determined that the bandwidth is legitimate, and you think it will continue at these levels, it's time to upgrade to a package with unmetered bandwidth:
- Click Services
- Click the green Active button to the far-right of the hosting package for your hosting account
- Click the green Upgrade button below your package name
- Select the Venus Plan or Earth Plan and continue checkout.
- If you've determined that the bandwidth is legitimate but you don't plan on utilizing as much next month, you can safely leave it as is and just pay the FlexUse overage charge. Bandwidth resets to zero at the beginning of each billing cycle.
Unmetered vs. Unlimited
Why shouldn't you just go with a host who offers unlimited everything?
By nature, servers just cannot be unlimited in space. Sure, they can be really big; however, if a host offers unlimited space, it's a marketing tactic. I prefer to call it like it is - unmetered. This means we don't babysit your usage on these plans unless something looks fishy.
As for unlimited bandwidth, the server still has limits. If you put unlimited traffic on a freeway, what happens? Traffic jam! The same goes for servers. We won't play 'big brother' on the unmetered plans unless it doesn't look legitimate.
Earth Girl Hosting is pleased to offer quality servers and service. The all-you-can-eat attitude in hosting leads to more frustration than it's worth, so we've opted to provide carefully structured packages for your level of business.